Christians under pressure: from bigotry at school to imprisonment and murder

Faith leaders warn of a rise in persecution around the world. Here we focus on four countries where Christian believers face official discrimination and threats of attacks by militants – sometimes at the same time

Relatives of an abducted Coptic Christian weep outside their home in the village of el-Aour, south of Cairo.
Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

Egypt: ‘It pushes you to feel disengaged’

As a boy growing up in a country where football is a national passion, Mina Fayek joined a youth programme at a local sports club in the wealthy Cairo neighbourhood of Heliopolis. He started training, but one day he overheard his coach make an offhand remark: no Christians would join the first team, or make it to the championships.

“My parents and I knew this is not going anywhere, and I had to choose another game,” Fayek, 26, a software engineer and blogger, recalled. He tried handball and basketball, two sports seen as more acceptable for Egyptian Christians to play.

Mina Fayek, an Egyptian Coptic Christian, says the discrimination against his religion makes him feel disengaged from his country. Photograph: Jared Malsin for the Guardian

Fayek, an affable young man, believes his social status shielded him from the worst forms of persecution inflicted on poorer Egyptian Christians. Instead, he was subject to a more subtle form of discrimination: the sense that the highest echelons of power and status in his country were off limits because of his religion.

During his 13 months of compulsory military service, he trained soldiers and officers in computer skills. As a Coptic Christian, he knew he could never serve in the intelligence branch. No Christians sit on the supreme council of armed forces.

“It pushes you to feel disengaged from your country,” Fayek said. “How could someone maintain his love for his country – and be passionate about building it – while at the same time he can’t be whatever he wants to be, whether a military commander or a police commander.”

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Egypt is home to the largest Christian community in the Middle East, with the Copts widely estimated to be about 10% of the population. The exact figure is a matter of dispute, with the government and Coptic church offering varying estimates. In spite of a history of cooperation between the church and the Egyptian state, Copts today say they face both official discrimination and the threat of violent attacks by militants.

Numerous Egyptian Copts participated in the 2011 uprising that removed President Hosni Mubarak from power, and Copts have been targets of violence at key moments in the turbulent years since then. In October 2011, 28 people were killed when the military attacked a crowd of mainly Coptic demonstrators outside the state TV building in Cairo.

Sectarian attacks peaked in August 2013 in the wake of state crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood after the removal of the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. Crowds of men attacked at least 42 churches across the country in a massive assault blamed on Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood denied responsibility for the attacks.

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Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, the former military chief who led Morsi’s removal, has vowed to fight extremism and launch a new era of religious unity. Many ordinary Copts and the official church are vocal in their support for Sisi. But some Coptic analysts are concerned about both security and the prospects for Copts’ civil rights.

“You’re getting attacked now by extremists and by security, so in addition to the old-time discrimination in state bodies. It’s getting worse,” said Fayek.

Jared Malsin in Cairo

Pakistan: ‘We still stand for our rights’

Anthony Ibraz, a 31-year-old priest in Karachi, preaches tolerance to his flock, contextualising it with the history of persecution, and tries to help unemployed young men shut out of jobs because they are Christian.

His own family have suffered because of their faith: hardline neighbours ordered his father to take off the cross he was wearing and beat him up for preaching; his brother was killed by an extortionist targeting the family’s property, and he grew up hearing about and experiencing discriminatory attitudes at school and from shopkeepers.

Anthony Ibraz, a priest in Karachi, says persecution is an everyday reality for Christians and something he has experienced since childhood. Photograph: Saba Imtiaz for the the Guardian

In Pakistan, persecution is an everyday reality for Christians. “Persecution is not [only] about the blasphemy law,” said Ibraz at his parish office. “There are different kinds of persecutions. There is discrimination, when we go out, in education and jobs … sometimes slavery in Sindh and Punjab. There are people who come to us who say they are educated and capable but they don’t get jobs. The reason is religion.”

The persecution of Christians in Pakistan has been driven by multiple factors: the country’s blasphemy laws that are used to target Christians by implicating them in contentious cases, the proliferation of militant networks that have religious minorities in their crosshairs, and ingrained discrimination in society and the workplace. Over the past few years, scores of Christians – including a teenage girl – have been accused of blasphemy, often on the basis of hearsay.

There have been numerous attacks by mobs on Christian neighbourhoods and attempts to kill those accused of blasphemy. Last November, a Christian couple were lynched and burned to death in a brick kiln. Militants have carried out several high-profile attacks: in 2013, more than 80 Christians were killed in a bombing at the All Saints church in Peshawar. In March this year, two bombs went off outside two Lahore churches, killing at least 15 people.

According to a 1998 census, Christians make up less than 2% of Pakistan’s population, and have nearly no political influence. “We do stand for our rights, and we raise our voice,” Ibraz said. “The Christian community – or the minorities – are more aware now about blasphemy cases and persecution. They are more aware now of sending messages, or to appear in the media. They know what the result could be.”

While Ibraz acknowledges that the Christian community is tiring of tolerating widespread discrimination and repeated attacks, he still preaches patience.

“At one of the protests outside the press club I heard the slogan ‘Until when? The tolerance is over.’ We have been tolerating for so many years, for decades. But at the same time, we as clergy always put this proposition in front of them: ‘No, still we can wait.’ Maybe something good will have come out. At the same time we tell them that this persecution becomes a reason to unite. If we are together, you can do something. There are other ways: to sit and talk and have a dialogue.”

Saba Imtiaz in Karachi

China: ‘The repression will only help Christianity spread’

Two days before Pastor Xu Yonghai was released from jail in 2006, police installed CCTV cameras outside his Beijing home to monitor his movements.

“You get used to it,” the 55-year-old underground church leader said of his 24-hour surveillance. “It won’t stop me practising Christianity.”

For more than 25 years, Xu has spoken out against the officially atheist Communist party’s mistreatment of China’s Christian community, now estimated to have up to 100 million members.

He has denounced the bulldozing of churches and attacks against preachers, and has been imprisoned twice on charges he believes were related to his activism, spending a total of five years behind bars.

Xu Yonghai, who has twice been imprisoned, says repression has increased dramatically in China over the past two years. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Trapped in cramped cells without company or books, Xu says he whiled away the hours composing religious texts in his head and praying. “Please give me the strength to hang on,” he would say. “Please let the policemen confess their crimes and repent their sins.”

Xu became a Christian in February 1989 after chancing upon one of Beijing’s then few churches. Months later he watched as troops killed hundreds of student protesters during the 4 June Tiananmen massacre.

It was a watershed moment for the church, he says. Repulsed by the Communist party’s brutality, many of his peers joined him in embracing Christianity.

“It’s like you finally realise that your old lover is evil and vicious, and then you meet a nice and kind new girl. How can you not love her?”

Despite a period of severe repression in the 1990s, Christianity has blossomed in China.

There were only about a million Christians in China when the communists took power in 1949. Today, the country’s state-controlled Protestant and Catholic churches claim at least 23 million members, according to conservative official statistics. Add to that many thousands of unregistered and technically illegal “house” churches, such as Xu’s, and some believe the true figure is nearer 100 million.

But in reality, religious practice is tightly controlled and subject to growing repression. After a period of relative relaxation, Xu says the situation has deteriorated dramatically over the past two years.

The precise reasons for the intensifying persecution remain unclear but Xu links it to the rise of Xi Jinping, who became Communist party chief in 2012. Xi has overseen a major offensive against human rights lawyers, academics and activists. “The people who are in power now – the Red Guard generation – view Christianity as the embodiment of anti-scientific ignorance.”

Still, some experts expect China will have the world’s largest Christian community by 2030 – close to 250 million – and Beijing’s hostility would do nothing to stop that, Xu said. “Their repression will only serve to help the spread of Christianity.”

Tom Phillips in Beijing; additional reporting by Luna Lin

The Holy Land: ‘They came in the night’

The smell of burning still lingers in the Church of the Multiplication on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

The target of an arson attack last month by suspected Jewish extremists – three people are under arrest – the church’s roof is missing from several rooms. Walls are scorched and the wooden doors, where the arsonists laid their fires, are charred black.

Nearby, in a newer annex built by the Benedictine order that cares for the church and monastery, the attackers painted graffiti on the wall calling for the “destruction of false idols” – part of a Jewish prayer known as the Aleinu.

“They came in the middle of the night,” said Fr Matthias, one of the Benedictine monks. “We’re not sure if they came by boat or climbed over the wall. We think there must have been at least three of them because they lit the fire in two places while someone else painted on the wall.”

Matthias, one of the Benedictine monks who lives at the Church of the Multiplication on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, shows the damage done to the church and monastery by suspected Jewish extremists. Photograph: Peter Beaumont for the Guardian

Built in the 1890s on land bought by an association of German Catholic dioceses as a place of pilgrimage to the lake where Jesus is said to have multiplied five loaves and two fishes to feed 5,000 people, it is not the first time the monastery has come under attack.

Just over a year ago, pilgrims praying by the lake had stones thrown at them by a group of ultra-orthodox youths. In Jerusalem, the Church of the Dormition, to which the monastery is attached, was also attacked by an arsonist.

According to a statement from the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, which includes churches as well as the chief rabbinate and the Islamic waqf: “Since December 2009, about 43 churches and mosques were torched or desecrated, yet not a single person has been prosecuted by the authorities.”

While Christians across the Middle East have come increasingly under assault in recent years – most often by jihadis – the attacks in the Holy Land itself, whose Christian population is dwindling, have a particular resonance.

“It is an unprecedented phenomenon in our experience,” said Matthias, visibly angry. The attack on his church was condemned by Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, and the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who said:

“Freedom of worship in Israel is one of the foundation stones of our values and is protected by law. We will exercise the full weight of the law with those responsible for this criminal act.”

Now the five monks have hired a security guard to patrol the monastery.

Matthias was careful to distinguish between the majority of Israelis and those behind recent attacks on churches, but echoed a concern among many Christian leaders here that not enough was being done by the Israeli authorities to crack down on the extremist settlers most often linked to the attacks.

Matthias stands in front of Hebrew graffiti calling for the ‘destruction of false idols’, scrawled on his monastery by suspected Jewish extremists last month. Photograph: Peter Beaumont for the Guardian

“We are really angry. We feel as though not enough is being done by the authorities to find the people behind these attacks. We need to put it in perspective. We know this isn’t Syria, where Christians are frightened for their lives, but what we are asking, as a first priority, is that they bring them to justice so no one else will be inspired to do this kind of thing.”